No Bones About It – Making Chicken Stock Using Boneless Breasts

So here was the problem: My poor little girls have been sick, and I wanted to make homemade stock with all the added health benefits instead of using my go-to easy-peasy chick base to make homemade chicken soup. HOWEVER…I don’t usually buy anything but boneless, skinless chicken breasts. I searched and searched for a recipe or tips on how to still make a tasty, adequate stock without using bones/carcasses and found NOTHING. Seriously…zip, zilch, nada, nothing. So, I decided it was time to experiment and make up my own…and I am so happy with the results, I think I shall share it with the world! (Or at least whomever comes across my rantings here.)   🙂

As I mentioned, my chicken purchases are almost always of the boneless, skinless variety; I seldom (pretty much as close as you can get to never without being never…is that a double negative?) buy any sort of bone-in chicken. Luckily, I found out you can make a delicious broth using some very basic ingredients and some time. >now I have to do some old-fashioned recipe-posting here since I haven’t sprung for the blog extras I need for a recipe plugin<

Ingredients:

• 6 Chicken (med-large) Breasts
• 2 Medium Onions (yellow or white)
• 6 Celery stalks (including leaves)
• 4 Large Carrots, Peeled
• 6-7 Garlic Cloves
• 16 Cups of Water
• 2 tbsp Black Peppercorns
• 1-2 tbsp Salt (I use sea salt)
• 1 tsp Rosemary
• 1 tsp Thyme (hey, have you got the thyme? bahahahaha!……ok, fine, bad joke :p )
• 4 Bay leaves
• Parsley (if you have fresh, use that, a pretty good handful…I didn’t have any, so I just used the rest of the dried parsley.)

Instructions:

1. Chop onions, celery and carrots into large chunks, about 2 inch sections.
2. Peel and smash garlic (turn a large knife flat to smash).
3. In a large stock pot, add chicken breasts, chopped veggies & garlic, and water.
4. Add peppercorns, salt, rosemary, thyme, parsley & bay leaves.
5. Bring contents to a boil, then turn down heat to a simmer.
6. Simmer for 1 1/2 to 2 hours.
7. Carefully remove cooked chicken breasts & set aside.
8. Place a strainer over/in a large bowl, carefully strain broth to remove the cooked veggies and discard cooked veggies.

Yields about 16 cups of broth.

Super simple, right?! And it turned out great! I made chicken noodle soup with the stock, some fresh veggies and just over 1/2 of the cooked chicken, along with some homemade bread. Husband (who is pretty picky) said he loved it, along with my girls! Yay!

Chopped Veggies & Garlic

Chicken Breasts

Ready to go! It already smelled amazing at this point and it hadn’t even started cooking yet!

Just keep simmering, just keep simmering…simmer, simmer, simmer simmer…

Strain and discard the veggies (you’ve pretty much cooked everything out of them at this point) and your broth is ready to rock!

I found the bread recipe here; I will admit that I missed the part about a 3 hour rise in my recipe review (oops) so I rushed it along a bit, using my warm oven to speed up the rise process a bit. The bread was not as poofy as it should have been, but it’s totally delicious, and if I would have made to time to make it correctly, and had Brienna (one of my girls) not been asking every 5 minutes when the bread was going to be ready, it would have been perfect. Still yummy though.

And the best news? After not being able to keep anything – and I really mean ANYTHING – down all day, Alexis (my other of my girls) was able to drink first a cup of warm broth (I’d set some aside just for her) and then even ate some soup. Yay!